Today I continue my ongoing exploration of leftist academic bureaucracy by focussing on a prime recent example of this culture in action. Within the politicized postmodern academy, intellectuals like to think of themselves as activists whose scholarship contributes to important socially progressive--and even politically subversive--projects. A look at how the academy runs tells a different story, however, one that suggests that an ideologically-driven academe does more to enforce collective mental inertia and individual moral erosion than it does to encourage fierce intellectual independence.

Exhibit A: Collective contemplation as decisive action

The bureaucratic machinery of leftist academe is a fabulously efficient mechanism for ensuring the ideological stasis upon which the present-day university depends. Its central principle is to prevent change by making endless contemplation the principle work of management.

The scene of that contemplative administrative work is the Committee Meeting. When there is a problem, what do you do? You form a committee on the problem. What does the committee do? It meets. What does it do at meetings? It massages the problem. This activity proceeds until either a) the problem ceases to seem to be a problem (this is most often achieved by "redefining the problem"); or b) the problem proves to be even more problematic than it had first appeared (in this instance, additional committees and further meetings are required, thus deferring the inevitable moment of defining the problem away by "redefining" it). The mechanisms of the academic committee meeting are sacred. Academics grouse about their committee work--commonly known as "service"--but they also revere it as the mechanism of a consensus-based approach to governance; i.e., service is self-serving. Just how deeply academics revere the concept of the committee is revealed in moments of danger: when an administrator or a professor acts unilaterally--even if that action is entirely within that person's professional jurisdiction--all hell breaks loose.

True to the Taylorist ideal they both exemplify and undercut, the principles of contemplative management provide a maximally efficient means of never getting anything of substance done (a "consensus-based approach" to problem-solving usually translates into doing nothing beyond trying to arrive at an ever-elusive, endlessly receding consensus). Never getting anything done means no change; no change in turn ensures that entrenched procedures for hiring, firing, promoting, admitting, and teaching--as problematic and even corrupt as they often are--remain entrenched. Most importantly, contemplative management looks busy where it is actually busily being inert. As such, it works beautifully to create the effect of decisive action when in fact no action is taking place.

Case in point: California Governor Gray Davis' Seven Point Action Plan for addressing hate on campus. In response to the string of anti-Semitic incidents on UC and Cal State campuses this past year, Davis has asked Richard Atkinson, president of the nine-campus UC system, and Charles Reed, chancellor of the 23-campus Cal State system, to address the growing racial tensions among students by reviewing and assessing policies, procedures, and courses. In other words, he calls for committees and meetings. This is an action plan that calls for neither action nor a plan. Davis does not even call for reports on the reviews.

What Davis does call for is cant, which we should understand here as the moral proclamations of a disembodied bureaucracy that has neither the inclination nor the spine to back them up. For example, he recommends issuing a hollow warning to freshmen that hate crimes will be prosecuted (alert freshman haters will recall how the criminal charges were dropped against SFSU's pro-Palestinian hate group, and will proceed to hate undeterred). And he just as hollowly recommends promoting civic values of tolerance and understanding on campus, even though it is precisely the rhetoric of tolerance that has been used to excuse the intolerant and uncivil behavior of pro-Palestinian students at SFSU, Berkeley, and beyond. It remains to be seen whether Atkinson and Reed manage to do much better, though it should be noted that at least they have asked each campus to report on the results of its internal review.

Bureaucratize the contemplative life, and this is what you get: action plans whose plan is not to act. As Richard Russo points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls>, the contemplative life is itself inherently bureaucratic: "The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband." Put a lot of intellectuals on committees and you get an academic administration centered not on doing, but on discussing all the different things that could be done; not on deciding, but on deciding not to decide.

As collective contemplation comes to stand in for action, independent thought becomes, quite literally, unthinkable. In my next blog, I'll explain how with Exhibit B: Opinion Formation as Group Activity.